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Well, this all started out as a magazine article my wife showed me.
I read it and was hooked. Once I showed it to my son Jerry, he was hooked too! It showed
how to make a small pond with a half-barrel, add plants and fish, and make your own little
eco-system. Since I don't like to do anything small, we decided to go one step up and get
a preformed plastic liner and make it a little bigger (50 gallons).
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Here is our 'first' pond. |
This pond used a 50 gallon preformed plastic liner, plastic waterfall,
and an old sand filter from a small swimming pool to server the waterfall and act as a
biological filter. All was going well with the 16 goldfish and 8 frogs (Jerry caught them
and brought them home) until I realized we would have fishsicles when winter came unless I
brought them into the house.
Thats when it started.............The pond gets bigger!!!!
Click on the pictures below for a larger version.
A 5 foot diameter hole, 2 feet deep, with
a shelf around the edge 1 foot wide. I had to level the yard because the slope was about
14" off from the top. |
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The liner in place filling with water
(approx 300 gallons). You can see a lower shelf on the left hand bottom side. We put this
in to hold plants which don't go in the deeper water. |
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I've heard people say if you put a pond
in, the wildlife will be attracted to it. Not sure about the wildlife, but Jerry likes it! |
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Here's that wildlife again..:) You can
see the rocks sitting on the shelf, these will be partially submerged to give an area for
the frogs to hide. |
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Are we done yet dad, this is hard work! |
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Here is the 'almost' completed pond.
complete with fountain/biological filter, Parrots Feather, and Water Hyacinths. It just
needs some more stones and landscaping. You can also see the fence to keep out the little
guy, Tyler. |
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This is one of the pond's residents, Big
Green, resting on a rock next to the Parrots Feather. |
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12/30/98, our first snowfall. We had some
cold weather, but this is the first snow.It was a bit too cold, so we had to get a pond
de-icer. There was about 2" of ice on the pond one morning, frozen solid, even with
the pumps running. |
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De-icer plugged in and running keeps the
pond ice-free. |
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It was a lot of work, but we all had fun doing it!
The fish wintered well after adding the de-icer, nobody went
fin-up on me!
But spring '99 is here, nothing else to do but make it bigger!!!!!
Click here to see what's going to happen
next.
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